A couple of months ago, Victoria’s Secret starting doing something pretty interesting with their email newsletter. I started seeing unique emails from them marketing some athletic apparel with collegiate sports logos they’re selling now. The content of those newsletters is geo-targeted based on, apparently, the zip code you give them when you join their customer list. The really cool part is that it’s cross referenced with the major universities in the area. So, for example, a person living in Los Angeles, California might see “blah blah USC Trojans versus UCLA Bruins blah blah” because it’s rivalry week in the college football world so they play each other this weekend.

Pretty neat. The likelihood of someone (or a significant other) in L.A. being a Bruin fan or a Trojan fan is probably high. I think it’s a good idea and wish I knew how well it’s working for them. I know I’ve seen quite a few of the shirts they’ve advertised in the newsletter while tailgating at college football games this year but that may or may not be related.

So what’s not to like about this? Well, we live in a different state than the one with our favorite college sports team. In fact, almost all of their geo-targeted newsletter talk about two teams that I absolutely hate because of that. Every time I see one of those emails I alternate between being pissed off (my die-hard sports fan side) to being utterly impressed that they even thought of this (my internet business side). What I really think they need is an option for people like me to put in their favorite team. I’d gladly give up that marketing data so see stuff I’d actually buy for my better half.

Hmm. Now that I think about it, everything they’re showing me right now I might still buy but only to stomp on, douse in kerosene, and burn in effigy. That’s probably enough sports fanaticism for one article

If you’re doing email marketing you might think of ways to borrow this technique. Even though I’ve got a few minor beefs with it, it’s still a neat idea. Now we just need them to publish their conversion data so we know how effective this is. Or not.

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Thanksgiving. Football. Perfect.

Related articles:

1. Building An Email List – Maybe It Isn’t So Hard After All
2. 5 Reasons Why Our Cable Company Needs Niche Marketing Lessons

We heard some great advice while driving home one Sunday from a weekend road trip for anyone who wants to start a business. It’s easily adaptable to people who want to start an internet business so I thought it was worth sharing here. One of the guests on the eWomenNetwork weekly radio show built her business around teaching entrepreneurship. She encourages people to start a business part-time and said two interesting things.

Start By Thinking Small

The first thing she tells people is to start doing something to make $500 per month. Why should I worry about making $500 per month when I want $4000 per month? As she said, if you can’t make $500 then you can’t make $1000. If you can’t make $1000 then you can’t make $4000. Do something to make some money, leverage what you earn and what you learn, and use that to make even more money. Keep doing that and eventually you’ll reach your goals.

I see people forget this when they talk about a small internet business all of the time. It’s pretty common to see a member of a webmaster forum who joined six months ago talk about wanting to make a full-time income online and make 200+ posts, but not have a single website yet.

Forget about quitting your day job for a minute. Think of 10 ways you could make money with an internet business, take action on the best 2 or 3 of them, and start making a $1 per day. Just a measly $1. Once you do that you’ll see that it’s possible, learn more about how things work online, and have an income producing asset. Then you can make $2 per day and $10 per day and more. It’s overwhelming if you start with an unreasonable amount out of the gate.

Use Your Existing Skills

The second thing she said was don’t start by trying to learn an entirely new set of skills. If you’ve got a job then you’ve got some skills that people will pay money for now. Adapt those to making money from a business. When you do that you’ll need to learn additional business skills, like sales and marketing, but you won’t need to learn the whole kit and kaboodle. Even if you don’t like your job there are probably aspects of it or skills you’ve mastered that you enjoy somewhat. Otherwise you probably wouldn’t be doing that kind of work in the first place.

How often do new webmasters ask about finding the hottest niches? Anyone interested in an area (or paid to work in an area) understands it in ways the outsiders just don’t. You already know some of the problems people in certain industries face and their concerns. What you should figure out is where there’s already a market need in your circle of competence. How you can apply your current skill set and interests to making money online?

Mystery Guru

Unfortunately, the archive for that particular show isn’t available online. I don’t remember the guest’s name so I can’t give you her website either. I’ll edit this post if I find out the name of that mystery small business guru but hopefully you got the gist of it.

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Loves listening to helpful podcasts and radio shows.

Related articles:

1. Starting The Right Small Internet Business For You – Part 2
2. Starting The Right Small Internet Business For You – Part 1
3. 3 Reasons This Internet Business Is Doomed

Google added a feature that I really, really wanted to their already awesome Google Docs office suite. I’d written about how we’ve used Google Docs to work together more efficiently. One of the features I loved was how, after installing the Google Gears extension, you could edit documents without having an internet connection. That’s great for people like us who travel a lot, but still want to get work done, and aren’t always online.

One of the things I hated was not having any control over which documents got synced to your laptop or USB drive to allow you to edit them offline. The application chose what to sync and what not to sync. There have been plenty of times when we didn’t have internet access while traveling, I’d find out something wasn’t downloaded, and I couldn’t work on an active project.

Well, they’ve fixed that little problem so I’m a happy dude. Now there’s a menu:

More options -> Sync now (for offline access)

which lets you sync up any document, spreadsheet, or presentation that you select. I could potentially sync every single document in my account while I was online. That isn’t likely something I’ll do. I might sync everything in a particular folder though. Either way, having the option is nice.

What features do you want to see Google add next?

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Happy to see continuous improvement in Google Docs.

Related articles:

1. Using Google Docs And Google Gears To Improve Productivity
2. Using Google Keyword Tool Instead Of Wordtracker For Keyword Research

I don’t normally make recommendations until I’ve used a product or service for a couple of weeks. I’m making an exception with Bad Behavior. The creators label it as a supplement to your existing comment spam protection, Akismet in our case, and claim that it helps stop spam from ever reaching the filters on your website. So far, I agree with them because it’s doing a bang up job.

This website isn’t high profile but still had days where Akismet flagged 50+ blog comments as spam. Most of them actually were spam but I still had to go through occasionally looking for comments from a real person. It pissed me off that I had to waste time doing that so I started looking for something automated to help. That’s when I found the Bad Behavior plugin for WordPress.

Bad Behavior looks at a bunch of things (HTTP headers, website blacklists, etc) to determine if something is spam and then eats it up before reaching your other spam filters. It also keeps a log of what it’s doing for anyone who cares. It’s supposed to work on other content management systems (Drupal, Joomla, etc) but I’ve only tested it with WordPress. I started running it four days ago and just two comments made it into the existing filter so far. Both of those were actual spam, caught by Akismet, and it doesn’t look like any comments from real people got blocked to this point. Very cool.

One thing did come up while installing the plugin. Anyone using the caching plugins, like WP Super Cache, needs to add one line to the PHP code. That’s pretty simple but it’d be nice if the coders would work together to make it easier on people. It talks about making that change in the installation guide.

I’d definitely give this plugin a whirl to find out if it works for you.

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Wondering if I just invited more comment spammers.

Related articles:

1. Blog spam
2. YARPP Is A Great WordPress Plugin For Showing Related Posts
3. WordPress Plugins

How many internet business owners out there buy products and services from freelancers? Almost all of us do at some point because there isn’t enough time in the day and it frees you up to focus on higher ROI activities. A lot of internet entrepreneurs that freelance forget about an eager group of customers sitting right in front of them though. So where is this pool of potential clients?

We’ve paid for article writing, directory submission, and a host of other things over the last couple of months. One and two person shops performed most of those services for us. Guess how many of them asked us for repeat business?

Nada. Zilch. Zero.

I started thinking about this a few days ago and, in the entire time we’ve been outsourcing, there hasn’t been a single service provider follow up with us at a later date to ask if we needed anything else. After smooth transactions with landing page designers, social bookmarkers, writers, directory submitters, and whoever else, you’d think someone would ask for more business. I actually prefer working with the same people again and, while we’ve done other projects with some of those people, I’ve always initiated the contact.

I feel like captain obvious saying this but it boggles my mind. I always need something done. I don’t want people spamming me but, seriously, if I liked your work the first time then I’ll likely hire you again. Maybe ask people if they’d like to opt-in to your newsletter. Then you can highlight a new skill you’ve picked up, let people know if you’ve got some downtime and could turn around a project quickly, and drop your old clients a line when you’re discounting your rates. Your customer list is an asset. Use it.

What’s in it for you?

1. You don’t need to advertise.
2. You don’t need to tout your superiority over your competitors.
3. You don’t need to build up the relationship to close the sale.
4. You don’t need to worry about getting stiffed.

What’s in it for me?

1. I don’t need to go looking for a good freelancer in a sea of mediocre ones.
2. I don’t need to worry about the quality and timeliness of your work.
3. I don’t need to wonder if I can trust you.

Why is it that people, especially freelancers, forget about getting repeat customers?

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Thinks existing customers need love too.

Related articles:

1. Starting The Right Small Internet Business For You – Part 1